Seven-plus decades of friendship

Published: Sunday, June 30, 2013 at 06:50 PM.

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Marcom began cooking, using her own recipe to make Brunswick stew and “thickening it up” with peas, butter beans, corn and tomatoes, she said.

“(We) did the cooking,” King said, “then about 11:30 (a.m.) we had everything done. We’d run to the restroom, put on the uniform and wait on the tables. And then we got through waiting on customers — the rush — she would go back to the kitchen and start preparing for the next day, and I’d wash dishes.”

In the early 1950s, King may have started the trend of making individual banana puddings — selling every one.

“I never heard of one, but I thought it was a selling card,” she said.

She made as many as two dozen at home — loading them up on a truck — until King Sr. told her to start making them at the restaurant.

“The strawberry shortcakes that she made for Mother’s Day for so many, many years was a tremendous success,” King Jr.’s wife Carolyn King said. “She always sold out.”

The restaurant would stay open late on Friday nights for students heading back to New Bern after a ball game, Marcom said.

Margaret King and Hazel Marcom have been friends since eighth grade. Their friendship has stretched for more than eight decades — each are 91-years-old and they’ve worked together on-and-off for much of that time at King’s Restaurant.

When King’s father died, she was taken to an orphanage at the age of 6. She returned to Kinston to live with her mother and began attending Southwood School, where she met Marcom.

“I helped her with her math,” Marcom said, “and she helped me singing. She can sing. She still can sing.”

King confessed, “She was a little brainier than I was and she’d help me get up some of my lessons. She would do some of my homework for me.”

King’s social life took priority over working on her lessons. At about the 10th grade, she met Wilbur King, deceased since 1973, when he was about 25 years old and working at a service station.

“I liked him,” she said. “I said, ‘I got a chance. I got him.’ ”

So she left school to marry King in 1941. His father owned the property where the restaurant is located now and had built a country store there. He started King’s Restaurant in the back of the store, selling hot dogs and hamburgers.

After Wilbur King Jr. was born in 1943 and the family was living with Wilbur Sr.’s mother behind the store, someone came to the house one Saturday night and said her husband needed to see her.

“And I had never been in the restaurant before,” she said. When she got inside, he told her he was out of coffee cups.

“So I got down in that big old sink, and they had just put it in,” she continued, “and washed up the cups and saucers, and then I went back home.”

That was the start of her career, and “Momma King” watched King Jr. while she worked the register, cooked and did whatever was needed.

When King had left high school, Marcom continued on with her studies and graduated. The two went their separate ways for awhile.

Due to a family connection between the Kings and Marcom’s family, King and her husband offered Marcom a job at the restaurant around 1946.

“(Marcom) was the first person he hired, other than family,” King Jr. said.

Marcom began cooking, using her own recipe to make Brunswick stew and “thickening it up” with peas, butter beans, corn and tomatoes, she said.

“(We) did the cooking,” King said, “then about 11:30 (a.m.) we had everything done. We’d run to the restroom, put on the uniform and wait on the tables. And then we got through waiting on customers — the rush — she would go back to the kitchen and start preparing for the next day, and I’d wash dishes.”

In the early 1950s, King may have started the trend of making individual banana puddings — selling every one.

“I never heard of one, but I thought it was a selling card,” she said.

She made as many as two dozen at home — loading them up on a truck — until King Sr. told her to start making them at the restaurant.

“The strawberry shortcakes that she made for Mother’s Day for so many, many years was a tremendous success,” King Jr.’s wife Carolyn King said. “She always sold out.”

The restaurant would stay open late on Friday nights for students heading back to New Bern after a ball game, Marcom said.

Later, King had a daughter, and Marcom had two daughters. They both took time off to have their children by the late 1950s and returned to work, for the most part.

“Ms. Margaret helped and encouraged me all the way,” Marcom said. “She answered the phone and said thank you when I was real busy.”

King said she and Marcom were working partners, but didn’t socialize beyond their working relationship.

“We were just nice, close friends,” King said, “and we worked together great — still do to this day.

King was hosting a couple of days a week when she left the restaurant in March because of illness.

She and Marcom said they miss the customers. But the customers miss them, too. One regular from the Raleigh area even stopped by the assisted living home where King lives to pay her a visit on his way to the beach.

“On the days that I’m there (at the restaurant),” King Jr. said, “at least a dozen people ask me how she is. Everybody misses her.”

Today, Joe Hargitt runs King’s Restaurant and King Jr. helps out. Hargitt has worked there since the age of 17.

Marcom, who quit working about three weeks ago but still drives a car, said working at King’s was “a real pleasure.”

“God has blessed me with good health and a strong will,” she said, “a good job and good people to work with. We'll miss them, but stay in touch.”

Margaret Fisher can be reached at 252-559-1082 or Margaret.Fisher@Kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter @MargaretFishr.